ACM Awards

ACM recognizes excellence through its eminent series of awards for technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer science and information technology. ACM also names as Fellows and Distinguished Members those members who, in addition to professional accomplishments, have made significant contributions to ACM's mission. How to Nominate

ACM has named 54 of its members as ACM Fellows for major contributions in areas including database theory, design automation, information retrieval, multimedia computing and network security. The accomplishments of the 2017 ACM Fellows lead to transformations in science and society. Their achievements play a crucial role in the global economy, as well as how we live and work every day. “To be selected as a Fellow is to join our most renowned member grade and an elite group that represents less than 1 percent of ACM’s overall membership,” says ACM President Vicki L. Hanson.(Image: 2016 ACM Fellows)

ACM has named 43 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. The 2017 Distinguished Members are responsible for an extraordinary array of achievements, reflecting the many distinct areas of research and practice in the computing and information technology fields. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes members based on professional experience as well as significant achievements in the computing field.

ACM has named Sir Tim Berners-Lee of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford the recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.

ACM has named Alexei Efros of the University of California, Berkeley the recipient of the 2016 ACM Prize in Computing. Efros was cited for groundbreaking data-driven approaches to computer graphics and computer vision focusing on understanding, modeling and recreating the visual world around us.

Palash Dey of Department of CSA, IISc Bangalore has received the ACM India Council's 2018 Doctoral Dissertation Award for resolving complexity of fundamental problems in computational social choice. Honorable Mentions went to Swagato Sanyal of School of Technology and Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai, for complexity measures of Boolean functions; and Manoj Agarwal of IIT Bombay Department of CSE, for data as graph.

ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association have announced the 2017-2018 winners of the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. The award recognizes computer science talent in high school students and comes with a $10,000 prize, which they will receive at CSTA's annual conference in July.

ACM has named Lydia E. Kavraki of Rice University as the 2017-2018 Athena Lecturer. Kavraki was cited for the invention of randomized motion-planning algorithms in robotics and the development of robotics-inspired methods for bioinformatics and biomedicine.

ACM has named a 12-member Chinese team the recipients of the 2017 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their research project employing high performance computing to create 3D visualizations relating to a devastating earthquake that occurred in Tangshan, China in 1976. The award was bestowed during SC17.

Jeffrey Heer has been named the recipient of the 2016 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for developing visualization languages that have changed the way people build and interact with charts and graphs across the Web. Heer has been a leader in developing computer languages to create charts, graphs and other visualizations that help people explore and understand data.

Amos Fiat and Moni Naor have been named recipients of the 2016 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for the development of broadcast encryption and traitor tracing systems. Their original ideas are now used by cable television and satellite radio providers to ensure that only paying subscribers can decrypt a broadcast.

Leonard Jay Shustek has been named recipient of the 2016 ACM Distinguished Service Award for the establishment and success of the Computer History Museum, the world’s leading institution in exploring the history of computing and its impact on society. Shustek has helped bring to the world the story of how the greatest innovation of our time has come to be.

Owen Astrachanwas named recipient of the 2016 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Awardfor three decades of innovative computer science pedagogy and inspirational community leadership in broadening the appeal of high school and college introductory computer science courses.

Ken Banks has received the 2016 ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for developing FrontlineSMS, using mobile technology and text messaging to empower people to share information, organize aid, and reconnect communities during crises. Banks saw an opportunity to harness the world’s most-used communication platform—mobile messaging—to help people in the developing world.

Valerie Barr has received the 2016 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for reinventing ACM-W, increasing its effectiveness in supporting women in computing worldwide and encouraging participation in ACM. Since becoming Chair of ACM-W in 2012, Barr has been a driving force in more than tripling the number of ACM-W chapters around the world.

Moshe Vardi of Rice University has been named the recipient of the 2017 ACM Presidential Award. Vardi was recognized for building ACM's flagship publication Communications of the ACM into the computing field’s preeminent print and online magazine. This is his second Presidential Award.

The late Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker was named the recipient of the 2017 ACM - IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award for networking and distributed computing contributions including Ethernet, the Xerox Alto, and development of the first tablet computers. His achievements span the full breadth of computer development, from analog circuit and power supply design to logic design, processor and network architecture, system software, languages, and applications.

Haitham Hassanieh of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has received ACM's 2016 Doctoral Dissertation Award for developing highly efficient algorithms for computing the Sparse Fourier Transform. Honorable Mentions went to Peter Bailis of Stanford University for coordination avoidance in distributed databases, and Veselin Raychev of ETH Zurich for creating programming tools based on probabilistic models of code that can solve tasks beyond the reach of current methods.

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) have announced that Cynthia Dwork (an ACM Fellow), Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim and Adam Smith are the recipients of the 2017 Gödel Prize for their paper, "Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis."

Jitendra Malik of UC Berkeley is the recipient of the 2016 ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for seminal contributions to computer vision that have led the field in image segmentation and object category recognition. One of the world’s leading researchers in computer vision, Malik and his lab team have solved several important problems in computer vision.

St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics, University of Warsaw, Seoul National University and St. Petersburg State University were the top medal winners in the 2017 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, held May 20 to 25 in Rapid City, South Dakota.

ACM presented seven Special Awards to finalists in the 2017 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the world's largest high school science research competition, held May 14-19 in in Los Angeles, California. ISEF honors the world’s most promising student scientists, inventors and engineers, selected annually from hundreds of affiliated fairs around the world.

ACM's celebration of 50 years of the Turing Award culminated with a conference June 23 and 24, 2017 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. Keynote talks and panel discussions highlighted the significant impact of the contributions of the Turing Laureates on computing and society, as well as looking ahead to the future of technology and innovation.

Shaden Smith of the University of Minnesota and Yang You of the University of California, Berkeley have been named recipients of the 2017 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. The Fellowships will be formally presented at SC17 in November.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award, computing’s most prestigious honor, acknowledges individuals who have made lasting and major contributions to the field. Here, we look back at some of these technologies and breakthroughs that continue to impact our lives, and the remarkable innovators who helped shape them.